Foster care and adoption; toddlers to young adults; it's all here-- faith and humor meet as this mom of four chronicles the joy and heartbreak of motherhood.

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

September, 2004: More than coincidence: Welcome Jamie!

I met my husband
because of a spinning pencil.

Bill
was 22, a new college graduate recently moved back to Milwaukee. After a summer
of living with his parents, a high school friend convinced him it was time to
move out. The pages of apartment rentals in the Sunday paper seemed daunting to
the guys, so Bill spun a pencil and announced that wherever it ended up
pointing to, they would live.

The
point stopped on an ad for the apartment across the hall from where my college
roommate and I were moving in.

Meetings
and beginnings are fascinating to me. Looking back on Bill and me moving in
across from one another, I know now that there could not have been a better way
that we could have met and started dating. I got to know Bill as we picked up
our mail together; as we talked in the hall with our keys in the locks, not
opening our doors. I took note of the environmental posters and the cross on
his living room wall. He was glad to see I had a high quality bike. Bill’s
subtle humor and thoughtful personality came through quietly and gradually. If
I had instead met him while out with friends, I might not have slowed down
enough to learn who he was.

Thirteen
years, one marriage, two sons and three foster children later, I think about
the Holy Spirit present in that pencil spin. While I’m cautious about using the
phrase, “It was meant to be,” I do believe God offers us opportunities through
the people we come in contact with. God nudges us to meet those who could help
us grow and learn or who could benefit from something we might be able to
teach. Whether we seize the opportunity or not is where free will comes in.
Yet, even as I hesitate to say, “It was meant to be,” it seems that sometimes,
it is.

We
received our third foster child last week. The other two have been returned to
family members. For the sake of confidentiality, I will call this new arrival Jamie.
She is 14 months old, Latina and beautiful.

Jamie
has been in foster care for over a year, since she was two days old. Social
Services called us a month ago to tell us about her situation. She was with a
wonderful foster family, the social worker explained, but it was now looking
like there was a chance her birth parents’ rights would be terminated. Because
of this possibility, Jamie needed to be moved to a foster home where the
parents were open to adoption, should this become necessary. Her current foster
parents were in their 50’s and adopting babyJamie was not an option — they had grown biological children and an
adopted 13-year-old. Bill and I said that we were interested and set up a time
to meet.

The
night before we were to meet Jamie for
the first time, I went to my monthly book club meeting.

I
had not told the group about the potential foster child yet, and as we stood
around drinking wine and chatting, Kris, a mom of two, turned to me and said,
“I thought of you the other day. The grandmother of a girl on my son’s soccer
team is a foster mother, and her foster baby needs to be moved. I told her I
knew the perfect family — yours, but she said social services already picked
out a family.”

Something
about the situation made me ask some follow-up questions. Was the woman white?
Yes. Did she have a 13-year-old African American son? Yes. Was the baby about a
year old and of Puerto Rican descent? Yes.

In
a metro area of over a million people, someone from my eight-person book club
had met our soon-to-be foster daughter — had sat next to her at soccer games —
and was telling me this twelve hours before I was due to meet her for the first
time.

“She’s
darling,” Kris said, as we realized it had to be the same family. “You’ll love
her. Her foster mother’s name is Judy.”

Over
the past month, as we have transitioned Jamie to our home, there have been other profound
coincidences —spinning pencil moments
—that have made both her foster mother,
Judy, and Bill and me pause.

Judy’s
best friend, another foster mom, turns out to be the foster mother Bill and
Iinvited over three years ago when we
were first considering foster care — we had received her name from a friend of
a friend. Listening to her story inspired us to sign up for the certification
classes. We had not seen her since, but Judy sees her a few times a week.

Jamie’s
physical therapist, we learned, is Julie, a good friend of mine from college.
Julie was working with Jamie one week, and when she heard the description of
the family Jamie would be moving to, she recognized it as ours.

Jamie
shares a birth date with my friend’s brother who recently died unexpectedly.

Judy
told me her pastor doesn’t believe in coincidences — he calls them
God-incidences, or incidences of God. My friend Amy calls them signs, and says
once you start looking for them, they’re everywhere.

To
me, they will always be spinning pencil moments. A flash of the divine in the
ordinary. A whisper from God, who is standing closer to us than we dare to
hope; closer than we have the courage to believe. Spinning pencil moments. Not
lightning bolts or thunder claps, just quiet reminders that the grace of God is
here. Is everywhere. Welcome Jamie.

About Me

Annemarie writes locally and nationally on foster care, adoption, parenting and spirituality. She is responsible for the content in At Home with Our Faith (circulation 80,000), which has won the First Place award in its category from the Associated Church Press for three consecutive years. Her Training Wheels column has appeared in the Milwaukee Catholic Herald since 2002 and most of these blogs appeared first in her Training Wheels column or as a chapter of her book, Discovering Motherhood (Ambassador Press, 2006). She is married to Bill, with four children (two biological, two adopted), and works in a job-share position at Johnson Controls as director of Corporate Programs in Diversity and Public Affairs.